| To echo other comments about "culture" here, I'd like to give you an example of how cultural alignment helps with certain things. For years and years I've had this horrible experience interviewing. Go all the way to the final round of on-site interviews (the panelists, day-long, etc.) then get rejected and nobody will tell me why. It's awful, beyond disheartening, and expensive in that it forces me to waste 60+ hours per company for absolutely nothing in return. So this time around when I started looking for a new employer, I took a slightly different approach. Just like you I'm applying only for jobs that I'm qualified for, but instead of agreeing to just any interview with any company I could get even a modicum of attention from, I changed my way of thinking to "I want to LIKE where I work and the people I work with, and I want to do something more than make some Ivy-league rich kid even richer; I want to have a positive impact on people's daily lives somehow." That led me to refocus the kinds of firms I was interviewing with. Instead of fintech, devops, or some other silicon-valley elitist crap, I paid special attention to small/mid-sized employers, particularly those who work with charities, non-profits, the poor, unemployed, or the government. I took some other interviews with the other kinds of aforementioned places, and instead of just sucking it up and desperately suffering an insane interview process as usual, I screened them this time around. I asked recruiters and hiring managers what their interview process was like, and in several cases I ended up telling them I wasn't interested and refused to suffer their insanity. I went so far as to tell one guy his process was elitist bullshit and I had more sane options elsewhere, so why would I bother with them? Probably not the smartest move, but I was pissed off. Haha :-) In the end I wound up getting an offer from a government contractor (US) for $40k a year more than I'm making now. Health benefits are roughly equivalent, the retirement plan is better, I get to do the kind of day-to-day work I enjoy (I don't get to do this where I'm at now) and best of all I get to build/improve systems that help people and their families. And that means a hell of a lot more than grinding a job I hate all so some fortune 500 exec can get his next massive bonus while i'm drastically underpaid vs. market rate. Another little tidbit I've personally noticed is that every job I've ever been hired for had an ex-military person in the hiring process, or as the hiring manager (or their manager). Every single one. I come from a military family (US Navy), though I never served myself (my loss). So my next job hunt I'm going to look for opportunities/industries with ex-military people involved specifically, and I'd be surprised if my luck didn't improve. |